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Hernani

HERNANI

A DRAMA BY VICTOR HUGO

EDITED WITH NOTES AND AN ESSAY ON VICTOR HUGO

BY GEORGE McLEAN HARPER, PH.D.

Professor of Romance Languages in

Princeton University

PREFACE.

The text of this edition is the same as that of the édition
définitive, Paris, 1880. The unusual length of the introduction willbe pardoned, it is hoped, in view of the paucity of general reviews ofmodern French literature that are available for students in schoolsand some colleges. It contains the matter which I should require aclass of my own to get up for examination in connection with readingthis play or any other of Hugo’s works. The Historical Note is anecessity, and is introduced before the play to save students fromconfusion and waste of time.

Mr. H.A. Perry and Dr. John E. Matzke, in their editions of «Hernani»,
have so thoroughly annotated it that it has been impossible to avoidthe appearance of following them very closely; and there are indeedseveral notes for which I am directly indebted to them. Without theirindications, I should in other cases have been obliged to spend agreat deal more time in looking up references than has been necessary.It would be unfair to Dr. Matzke, in particular, not to pay tribute tothe completeness of his notes, which leave his successor little chancefor originality.

GEORGE McLEAN HARPER. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY June 16, 1894.

VICTOR HUGO.

For American and English readers who are at all well informed about
modern European literature the name of Victor Hugo stands out moreprominently than any other as representing the intellectual life ofFrance since the fall of Napoleon. Even the defects of his characterare by many considered typically French. They see him excessivelyconceited, absurdly patriotic, a too voluminous producer of veryvaried works; and it is not unusual to find that such readers believehim to be all the more French for these peculiarities. It would opentheir eyes if they should read what M. Ferdinand Brunetière, the mostauthoritative French critic of our generation, says of Victor Hugo.They would be surprised, if they conversed with intelligent Frenchmengenerally, to hear their opinions of him. Indeed if they had a wideracquaintance with French letters and French character they would notneed M. Brunetière or any other guide, because they would feel forthemselves that Hugo must seem to the French just as peculiar, just asphenomenal, as he does to foreigners. For it is only to superficialreaders that French literature can appear to be in the main frivolousor eccentric. Dignity is not necessarily severe. It cannot be heavy;indeed, grace is of its essence. And dignity is the note of Frenchliterature in the seventeenth century, its Augustan age. To say thatseriousness is the note of the eighteenth-century literature in Francemay sound less axiomatic, but I think it is even more true. No menare more serious than those who believe it to be their mission torevolutionize and reform society. We may not now take Diderot andVoltaire and Rousseau as seriously as they took themselves; but thatis partly because their purposes have been to a large extent achieved,and the result is an old story to us. The note of the nineteenthcentury in French literature is harder to catch, perhaps cannot becaught; for the voices are many, and we are too near the stage. Butif anything is evident it is that this epoch is marked by severe andconscientious industry. Criticism has been developed into an almostperfect instrument for quick, sure testing of literary claims. Aperverse book may, through neglect, through its insignificance, orindeed through its very absurdity, find a large number of gentlereaders in England or America. In France less favor would be shownit. The artistic sense is more widely diffused there; life centresin Paris, where values can be readily compared; and, above all, thecustom of personal journalism prevails in France. A man is not goingto waste his time in reading a new book if the critic most competentto judge condemns it over his own signature in the morning paper.And if a new book is so insignificant that no critic reviews it, thecondemnation of silence is even more annihilating. Then, too, thecompetition for literary honors is intense. The rewards are greaterthan in any other country: a seat in the Academy; a professor’s chairin the College de France; an office of dignity and pecuniary valueunder government; the knowledge that a successful French bookwill sell from St. Petersburg to Madrid, and from Amsterdam toConstantinople—all over the world, in fact; for in nearly everycountry people read two languages—their own and French. In thiscompetition it may not always be the best-written books that come tothe front; but the chance of their doing so is immensely greater thanelsewhere. And another beneficial result is the careful toil bestowedupon the preparation of books, the training to which authors submitthemselves, the style and finish, the lopping off of eccentricitiesand crudities, the infinite pains, in short, which a writer will takewhen he knows that his fate depends on his pleasing first of all aselect and cultivated audience of connoisseurs. No journeyman workwill do.

It was by such a tribunal that Victor Hugo was judged, long before his
name was known outside of France. And yet, although the popular voicehas been immensely favorable to him for two generations, this highcourt of criticism has not decided the case. The position of VictorHugo is by no means definitely established, as Alfred de Musset’s isestablished, and Balzac’s. But, whatever be the verdict, Victor Hugo,because of the power and quantity of his work, and his long life,certainly is the most imposing figure of this century in Frenchliterature.

It is often a questionable proceeding to make one man’s life and works
interpret for us the doings of his contemporaries, to try to find inone term the expression for a whole series of events. It is the mostconvenient method, to be sure, but not on that account the mostreliable. When therefore I remembered that Victor Hugo entered intoprominence only a little after the beginning of our century, and thatalthough dead he yet speaks, for the definitive edition of his worksis not completed, and every year adds new volumes of posthumous booksto that enormous succession; when I perceived how convenient it wouldbe to make him the central and distributive figure of this whole epochin French literary history,—I regarded the chronological coincidencerather as a temptation than as a help, and resolved not to yield tothe solicitations of a mere facile arrangement. For I had no greatbelief in Victor Hugo’s fitness to be called the representative andinterpreter of his age. I was under the influence of the prevailingAnglo-Saxon opinion of him as an egoist, whom even the impulsions ofhis mighty genius could not break loose from absorbed contemplation ofself.

Even a critic so appreciative of national differences as Lowell
expressed this opinion when he said: «In proportion as solitudeand communion with self lead the sentimentalist to exaggerate theimportance of his own personality, he comes to think that the leastevent connected with it is of consequence to his fellow-men. If hechange his shirt, he would have mankind aware of it. Victor Hugo, thegreatest living representative of the class, considers it necessary tolet the world know by letter from time to time his opinions on everyconceivable subject about which it is not asked nor is of the leastvalue unless we concede to him an immediate inspiration.»

Let us take another of these estimates, which might well deter one
from considering Hugo as capable of representing any body of men orany mass of life. I quote Mr. W. E. Henley, in «Views and Reviews», alittle volume of bright and suggestive «appreciations», as he callsthem: «All his life long he was addicted to attitude; all hislife long he was a poseur of the purest water. He seems to haveconsidered the affectation of superiority an essential quality in art;for just as the cock in Mrs. Poyser’s Apothegm believed that the sungot up to hear him crow, so to the poet of the «Légende» and the«Contemplations» it must have seemed as if the human race existed butto consider the use he made of his oracular tongue.»

These are but two of the many expressions of disgust anybody may
encounter in reading English or American criticism of Victor Hugo. Butnot discouraged by such estimates, and fortifying myself rather withthe thought of how the French themselves esteem him, I began to readVictor Hugo again with a view of determining whether or not hecould be accepted as the unifying representative, the continuousinterpreter, of French literature since the fall of Napoleon. And as aresult I can say that, for me, this one man’s life and works formulatenearly all the phenomena of French literary history from the battleof Waterloo down to the present day. Except comedy and the realisticnovel, be has excelled in every kind of literature which theFrench have cultivated during this century. With these two notableexceptions, he has been a champion, a precursor, what the Germans calla Vorfechter, in every great literary movement.

Nothing more deplorable can be conceived than the intellectual
condition of France under the First Empire. The fine ideals of theyoung republic were a laughingstock, a butt of saddest ridicule. Forthere is nothing men hate so much as the thought of a pure ideal theyhave once cherished and since shrunk away from; and the remembrance ofa lost opportunity to be one’s true self is the bitterest of griefs;and no reproach stings deeper than this, of a former and nobler stateof conscience which was not obeyed. Liberty was borne down under aweight of circumstance all the more oppressive because it wasthought that the new order of things was the natural product of theRevolution; and indeed it looked so. Literature was bidden to flourishby the despot. He posed as a protector of the arts, and at his commandthe seventeenth century was to begin again and a new Corneille, a newBoileau, a new Molière, were to adorn his reign. But he who conqueredItaly could not compel unwilling Minerva, and the victor of thePyramids could not reanimate a dead past. The writings of the period1800-1815, indeed the whole intellectual life of that time, its art,its music, its literature, its philosophy, are what might have beenexpected.

After the downfall of Napoleon what intellectual ideals remained in
France? With what equipment of thoughts and moral forces did she setout at the beginning of this new epoch? With no equipment that was atall adequate for solving the staggering problems set for her to solve.Just think of them! She had to deal with monarchy and a state churchall over again. She had to decide between the spirit of the old règimeand the spirit of ’89. There was a contradiction in her past, and shehad to turn her back on one or the other fascinating epoch in herhistory—either on Louis Quatorze and the grand siècle with all itsglory of treasured acquirement, its shining names, its illustrious andvenerable institutions, or on the less attractive men and measures andpurposes of the Revolution; and these latter, though apparently lessworthy of proud contemplation, impressed the conscience and thepolitical sense as being the things fullest of life for the dawningfuture. The most loyal conservative must have felt an awkwardconsciousness that the things he hated would in the end prevail.

Such, then, was the intellectual condition of France in
1815—uncertainty and division and dearth of ideals and purposes,in the face of a future full of perplexing problems. But she wasstrangely hopeful. She has never been otherwise. The French are themost elastic people in Europe, and no defeat has ever discouragedthem. And she was in love with herself as much as ever, and as fullyconvinced of her right to the leading place among all nations. Indeedit did not occur to her that she had ever surrendered that right.

What have been the principal lines of movement in French literature
since 1815? In order to answer this question we must not merely followthe traces of political history and say that literature changed withthe government. Such a solution would be facile, but would do violenceto the facts. The matter is verv indeterminate, and the best way tobring it into a clear arrangement is to ask ourselves who were theinfluential writers of any given period and what did they stand for.In 1815 there were three men prominent in French letters and life:Chateaubriand, Lamartine, and Lamennais. Victor Hugo was born in 1802,and by 1817 he had become a literary man, not by intention merely, butby writing. He came upon the scene, therefore, when these three menwere at the height of their activity; for Chateaubriand was born in1768, Lamartine in 1790, and Lamennais in 1782; and they, appreciatingthe need of leadership in France under the newly restored monarchy,had thrown themselves enthusiastically into the work of instructingthe people. Let us inquire who they were and what was the nature oftheir activity; or, in other words, what was the first public literaryatmosphere that surrounded Victor Hugo.

Chateaubriand at the age of seventeen was a captain of cavalry under
Louis XVI. When the Revolution broke out he came to America on aroyal commission to find the northwest passage. He brought letters ofintroduction to the chief personages of the new world, and wasmuch impressed with the simple and gracious reception given him byWashington, and with his unpretentious mode of life. After the failureof his geographical researches, the young officer plunged into theforest and started alone, on foot, for the Southwest, his head full ofromantic ideas about the beauty of primitive civilization, or absenceof civilization, put there no doubt by Jean Jacques Rousseau, of whomhe was an ardent admirer and a disciple. We are told that one eveningin an Indian wigwam he discovered a torn page of an English newspaperand read of the ravages of the Revolution and the flight and arrestof Louis XVI. His loyalty was awakened, and after two years ofsentimental wanderings in the forests of the Mississippi valley hereturned to France and enlisted with the Royalists. They received himwith suspicion, and even after his recovery, in exile, from a severewound received in their cause, they refused him fellowship. He livedin London and Belgium and the island of Jersey, composing his firstwork, an «Essai sur les Révolutions», 1797, in which his ideas,both of politics and of religion, are still in a line with those ofRousseau. Shortly after its publication some inward experience of thereality of life and its dependence upon God gave him an impulsion in anew direction, and he began his great apology for the Christian faith,entitled «Le Génie du Christianisme», 1802, of which «Atala» and«René» are only episodes. At this time Napoleon was re-establishingorder, and as he considered religion necessary to political security,and was just then courting the Pope, he showered favors upon the youngauthor, to the latter’s manifest harm, for they made him fickleand ambitious, and turned his natural sentimentality into the mostrepulsive egoism. His masterpiece was «Les Martyrs», a sort ofChristian epic, which appeared in 1809; and thereafter he was regardedas the leader in a conservative reaction back to Rome and back toroyalty.

Alphonse de Lamartine was a poet of greater significance, though
in his early years he stood in a secondary place, owing toChateaubriand’s influence with the clerical and royalist party, andindeed with all those who longed for peace and a revival of religiousfaith in France. His early life was as interesting as Chateaubriand’s,and, like his, its years of transition from boyhood to active manhoodwere spent in foreign lands. His poetry is characterized by a certainsoftness and sweetness peculiar to itself, reminding one somewhat ofEnglish Cowper. It is contemplative and religious; but that does notsay all, for its range is wide, and Wordsworth has demonstrated to uswhat a world of thought and fancy there may be in meditative poetry.The chief of his works are: the volume entitled «Les Meditations»,which contains that fine poem «Le Lac»; «Les Harmonies»; «Jocelyn»;«La Chute d’un Ange»; «Graziella»; «Voyage en Orient», and «L’Histoiredes Girondins». Lamartine succeeded in being a guide to his people inso far as he attracted them by his beautiful verse to a more seriouscontemplation of themselves and the world, to a renewed interest intrue religion, to an appreciation of the fact that Christianity wasstill alive and capable of inspiring enthusiasm. The feeling hadprevailed in France that vital Christianity was incompatible with thecultivation of the fine arts. Lamartine proved this to be untrue.He failed, however, when it came to writing history or engaging inpolitics, because, as Lowell long ago perceived, and as people nowgenerally acknowledge, Lamartine was a sentimentalist, that is, a manwho cultivated fine sentiments because they were beautiful and notbecause they were right, and who performed fine actions to be seen ofmen; in other words, an egoist, an artist spoiled by artificiality.Apart, however, from all question of the intrinsic merit of his work,his tendency was, like that of Chateaubriand, in the direction ofrecognizing religion and looking back to monarchical rather thanrepublican France for inspiration and example.

Félicité de Lamennais lived a life whose details belong as much to the
history of philosophy, or to ecclesiastical history, as to that ofbelles-lettres. First a priest, and the most ardent Catholic inFrance, he afterward turned against Rome and led a movement towardsreligious independence. There are few more interesting figures,chiefly because great religious leaders have been so rare in modernFrance. At the time when Victor Hugo was beginning to write, Lamennaiswas ardently engaged in an effort to establish the supremacy of Rome,not only over private conscience, but over political institutions, andalthough from his subsequent actions he is known to the world as aliberal and a heretic, yet at that time, having published in 1817 his«Essai sur l’Indifférence en Matière de Religion», he was the mostjealous conservative and the most fiery churchman in France.

Thus a superficial glance has sufficed to show that the first movement
which stirred literary France after 1815 was a reaction in favor ofmonarchy and Rome; that its champions were Chateaubriand, Lamartine,and Lamennais; that its effort was mainly through poetry; that itshonor was its high political and moral purity; that its defect was itssentimentality; that its ultimate inefficacy was due to its runningcounter to the tendency of the age. Into this movement Victor Hugoinevitably fell; by it he was for a long time carried; with it he atfirst kept step bravely.

At this point let us take a glance at Victor Hugo’s early life. He was
born in 1802, of respectable and educated parents. His father was anarmy officer of increasing distinction under the Empire; his mother asympathizer with the exiled Bourbons. During Victor’s early childhoodhe, with his mother and brothers, moved about through Italy, followinghis father’s campaignings under Joseph Bonaparte; but when the boyswere old enough to attend school their mother took them to Paris,while the father fought through a guerilla war against the brigandsheaded by Fra Diavolo. After several years of tranquillity in France,Madame Hugo and her sons were again called to follow the fortunesof the head of the family, this time in Spain. The father won ageneralship in the French army in that conquered country, and becamemajordomo of the palace at Madrid. The boys attended school in acollege for noblemen’s sons, and were badly treated by the youngSpaniards, who could not forget that the French lads were the childrenof one of their conquerors. But after a brief sojourn in Spain theyreturned to Paris, and there the poet-life of Victor Hugo began, andbegan in earnest; for during three years, at school and at home, hecomposed verses of all sorts, and in 1817, in competition for a prizeoffered by the National Academy, he wrote an ode which, although notsuccessful in the contest, brought him into public notice.

The next year he won a prize in the Floral Games of Toulouse, with a
poem which is published among his other works, and which is one of themost remarkable productions of precocious genius known to literaryhistory. In 1821 he had his first taste of the bitterness of life,and his boyhood came to an abrupt termination, in the death of hisexcellent mother. On the same day he became engaged to a young girlwho had for a long time been his schoolmate and almost a member ofhis own home-circle. Her parents allowed his suit, but postponed themarriage until he should have proved himself capable of supporting afamily. He set to work with feverish ardor and undertook almost everykind of literary production—odes, plays, novels. The first of hissuccesses under this new stimulus were two remarkable stories, «BugJargal» and «Han d’Islande», stories which indicate a strange andexuberant imagination, tropical in its fervor, its singularity, itsfecundity.

But it was in 1826, by the publication of his «Odes et Ballades», that
he laid the real corner-stone of his fame. The king, Louis XVIII,liked the poems, for a natural reason, as we shall see, and gave theirauthor a pension of one thousand francs, which in those days, andin economical France, seemed a large sum, and the young people werepermitted to marry. It will be interesting to observe what was thecharacter of the «Odes et Ballades». They are almost all politicaland religious, and all thoroughly conservative; all in praise of theBourbons, condemnatory of the Revolution; silent as to Napoleon, ornearly so, and glowing with devotion to the Roman Catholic Church.They remind us of what Wordsworth twenty-five years earlier wrote,in a precisely contrary spirit, when he was influenced by the hopesinspired by the first events of 1789, and before the subsequentoutrages changed him into a stiff British church-and-stateconservative. These early effusions of Hugo are noble pieces ofversification, and wonderful enough as the works of a very young man;but they cannot be called poetry of a high order, nor do they evengive promise of what he was to do later, except that towards the lastwe begin to find poems which bid us expect great things in the way ofstyle.

Two years afterward, in 1828, appeared a second volume of poems,
«Les Orientales», a collection of dream-pictures of Eastern life, insomewhat the same manner as the efforts of Thomas Moore which werepopular with young ladies of the last generation, but infinitelysuperior to all the «Lalla Rookhs» and other impossibilities of thatlittle Irish dandy. The fact is that some of Hugo’s most beautifullyrics are to be found in this collection, and certainly some of hisgreatest successes in passionate, highly-colored description. He was aman whose heart grew slowly, however, and we look in vain as yetfor poems which could teach us much about life and how to bear itpatiently or enjoy it nobly.

But we are now in the midst of the four years during which Victor Hugo
was changing his attitude towards art entirely, 1826-1830. Up to thistime he had not entered specially into the business of criticism,had not made theories about writing, but simply written, eithercelebrating his political heroes or letting his fancy wander throughdistant lands, which were full of glamour because distant. He hadgathered about him a circle of interesting people; indeed he wasalready the young king of nearly all the rising literary men andwomen in Paris. It was natural that there should be a great deal ofdiscussion among them about the rules and proprieties of their art;but Victor Hugo was still, in this matter as in every other, aconservative.

In 1827 he surprised this little world of admirers with a drama,
«Cromwell», in the preface to which he expounded some advanced viewsin regard to dramatic writing. His opinions were debated, and allParis was divided into their supporters and opponents. In 1830appeared «Hernani», which he succeeded in having played at the Théâtrefrançais, in spite of the opposition of the Academy, which saw in it amenace to good literature.

There are few exciting events in the history of literature. It is in
the main a record of quiet, intellectual lives, a story of thoughtsand tendencies. The account of a single border feud will present agreater number of striking incidents than the history of the forceswhich have produced our English poetry or Germany’s philosophy.And the few memorable anecdotes of a concrete character which arescattered here and there in the chronicles of literature usuallyattract more attention than they deserve. They are suitable chieflyto awaken the interest of children and ignorant people. Out of tenpersons who will tell you that Demosthenes practised oratory by thesea-shore, with a pebble in his mouth, not more than one has anynotion what his orations themselves were about. The man who is mostset agog by the story of Shakespeare’s poaching exploit is the leastlikely to have read his plays. The same thing might be said of thehubbub occasioned by the first representation of Victor Hugo’s«Hernani», on February 25, 1830. There is a temptation to make«Hernani» the text of disquisitions on Romanticism, forgetting that itis a drama of high intrinsic merit, and that the question of positivevalue is, after all, the essential one.